The Reformers

From St. Francis de Sales  The Catholic Controversy (kindle copy)

In speaking about the tactics of the Reformers:

I beg you, should we be? Do you not perceive the statagem? All authority is taken away from tradition, the Church, the Councils, the pastors; what further remains? The Scripture. The enemy is crafty. If he would tear it all away at once he would cause an alarm; he takes away a great part of it in the very beginning, then first one piece, then the other, at last he will have you stripped entirely without Scripture and without Word of God.

He then explains all of the books Calvin and Luther took away.


Here is a good quote by de Sales on heresy:

Heresy covers up, in the bed of its brain, the statue of its own opinion in the clothes of Holy Scripture

 “The Holy Word then is the first law of our faith; there remains the application of this rule, which being able to receive as many forms as there are brains in the world, in spite of all the analogies of the Faith, there is need further of a second rule to regulate this application.”

 “The Scripture cannot be your arbiter, for it is concerning the Scripture that you are in litigation, some of you being determined to have it understood in one way, some in another.”

—	Francis de Sales, The Catholic Controversy

see also http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2009/09/which-lens-is-the-proper-lens/

a quote from a book in this above link found in comment 14:

The Reformers unequivocally rejected the teaching authority of the Roman Catholic Church. This left open the question of who should interpret Scripture. The Reformation was not a struggle for the right of private judgement. The Reformers feared private judgement almost as much as did the Catholics and were not slow to attack it in its Anabaptist manifestation. The Reformation principle was not private judgement but the perspicuity of the Scriptures. Scripture was ‘sui ipsius interpres’ and the simple principle of interpreting individual passages by the whole was to lead to unanimity in understanding. This came close to creating anew the infallible church…It was this belief in the clarity of Scripture that made the early disputes between Protestants so fierce. This theory seemed plausible while the majority of Protestants held to Luthern or Calvinist orthodoxy but the seventeenth century saw the beginning of the erosion of these monopolies. But even in 1530 Casper Schwenckfeld could cynically note that ‘the Papists damn the Lutherans; the Lutherans damn the Zwinglians; the Zwinglians damn the Anabaptists and the Anabaptists damn all others.’ By the end of the seventeenth century many others saw that it was not possible on the basis of Scripture alone to build up a detailed orthodoxy commanding general assent. (A.N.S. Lane, “Scripture, Tradition and Church: An Historical Survey”, Vox Evangelica, Volume IX – 1975, pp. 44, 45 

from comment 16:

 Lane then writes,

The Reformers loved the church and highly respected her opinions. They respected her opinions above their own, in fact. And this is really the point. In submitting to the confessions, we acknowledge that the church is our mother.

By making themselves their own highest interpretive authority (and thus acting as biblicists), and without the authorization of the Church’s established teaching and ruling authorities, the first Protestants redefined the marks of the Church according to their own interpretation of Scripture. Then, having redefined the marks of the Church so that ‘church’ referred to those who shared their own interpretation of Scripture, they were free to do or say whatever they wanted against the Catholic Church, while telling themselves (and others) that they “loved the church and highly respected her opinions,” even “above their own”. Then they constructed their own confessions, and ‘submitted’ to them, and claimed that by doing so they were acknowledging that the church is their mother. But since they themselves had fashioned these confessions with their own hands, in ‘submitting’ to them they were in actuality saying, “We are our own mother, thank you.”

from comment 37:
We do have a duty to learn Scripture. But we have no duty to interpret Scripture-apart-from-the-guidance-of-the-Church or to interpret Scripture in defiance of the guidance of the Church. Instead, our duty in interpreting and understanding Scripture is to approach it very much as we approach the Eucharist offered to us by the Church: in humility and gratitude, and with a recognition that Christ, through the instrument of His Church, is giving this gift-of-Self to me, not so that I can do my own thing, but so that I can participate in something His Body is already doing, and has been doing for almost two-thousand years. For this reason, the responsibility of the student of Scripture should not be seen as in tension with the divinely-established interpretive authority of the Church, just as the responsibility of the Ethiopian eunuch to seek to understand the book of Isaiah was not in tension with the interpretive authority of Philip the deacon. The eunuch would have been acting against his responsibility had he ignored Philip or insisted that he knew better how to interpret Scripture than did the apostles and deacons. It was precisely the eunuch’s obligation to seek to understand Scripture that called him to receive in humble submission the guidance and instruction of those whom Christ had authorized (through ordination) to teach in His Name

from comment 39

 Did He found a visible catholic Church, or did He found only an invisible catholic Church? Because if He founded only an invisible catholic Church, then the visible one that we find in the fathers of the first three or four centuries is a man-made counterfeit, an earthly substitute for a spiritual entity, and in that case there is absolutely no reason to expect that man-made abomination to be teaching orthodoxy at all, let alone be protected from error. But if Christ founded a visible catholic Church, then the promises regarding the Church attach to it. In that case it is that visible catholic Church that will remain and prevail through the rest of the age, until Christ returns, and that is the pillar and ground of truth, and so forth. And in order for the visible catholic Church to be that sort of thing, until Christ returns, it needs to be protected from falling into heresy or apostasy. And that means that her teaching office needs to be protected in this way. It also means that her authority must derive in an organic way from Christ, and hence a visible catholic Church requires apostolic succession, otherwise, there is no divinely authorized teaching office (apart from miracle-working prophets showing up from time to time).

interesting article and discussion here by the reformed and Catholics response:http://greenbaggins.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/whose-lens-are-you-using/

quote by newman here  http://www.readability.com/articles/lxuqd2hz

Busenbaum, of the Society of Jesus, whose work I have already had occasion to notice, writes thus:—"A heretic, as long as he judges his sect to be more or equally deserving of belief, has no obligation to believe [in the Church]." And he continues, "When men who have been brought up in heresy, are persuaded from boyhood that we impugn and attack the word of God, that we are idolators, pestilent deceivers, and therefore are to be shunned as pests, they cannot, while this persuasion lasts, with a safe conscience, hear us."—t. l, p. 54.